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11/21/2004 Archived Entry: "My Thanksgiving Menu"

It’s Sunday, but there’s no time for rest for a book author doing promotion. I am off to the Bayside Barnes & Noble this morning. I’m arriving at 1 p.m. Hope to see many of you there.

This past week, I signed books at the Barnes & Noble at Lincoln Center in Manhattan and in Huntington, Long Island; at Book Ends in Ridgewood, New Jersey, and at Book Mark on Eleventh Ave. and 70th Street in Brooklyn. I left autographed copies of “Arthur Schwartz’s New York City Food” at all of them. If you can’t make it to one of the many events I am doing before Christmas (check my schedule), at least you can buy a book with my signature (big deal!).

Everywhere I go, there seems to be intense interest in my Thanksgiving menu. The feat is at my house this year, breaking with a 26-year tradition of having it at my sister, Andrea’s. So you will be glad to know that our Thanksgiving menu has shaped up/ Everyone is chipping in with the cooking, so it won’t be that much work.

For appetizers (away from the table), I am making the gougere that is on this site – I should add that I have now made this recipe with all Padano Grana cheese and with all Parmigiano, and it is still fabulous. I have also made the dough entirely in the food processor (as opposed to hand-mixing the cheese) and several days ahead and kept it in the refrigerator, ready to be portioned and baked. Every which way they have come out perfectly. I have also forgotten to put the coarse salt on at the end, and I can tell you that the puffs are better when you remember to use it.

Also as an appetizer in the living room I’m making the mushroom pate that is in “Naples At Table.” I’ll serve it with crackers. And I’ll put out some of the fabulous Spanish almonds that have now become available here. I get them roasted and salted at DiPalo, on Grand St. in Little Italy, but there are widely distributed. We (my sister, Rozanne Gold and I) have decided that we shouldn’t have more than that before we get to the table because no one will be hungry if we do. We always nibble too much before we get to the table, and as we are all, one way or another, diverging from our usual Thanksgiving this year, we might as well make other changes.

The main menu will start with a creamless cream of celery soup that I am going to totally invent on the spot on Wednesday – using both celery root (celeriac) and celery itself. I’ll thicken it and “cream” it with a bit of potato. (I am trying to duplicate a soup I had in Avellino last year.) With that I’ll serve the Lundy’s biscuits, the recipe for which is in my new book. (In Avellino, at the winery Feudi di San Gregorio’s restaurant, the soup carried a savory sfogliatella filled with diced pork.)

We then move directly to the turkey and trimmings, although Rozanne is threatening to make a small ham, too. We’ll have both whipped sweet potatoes (topped with marshmallows for the “kids” who are no longer kids) and mashed white potatoes (my brother-in-law, Milt, makes sensational gravy --can we leave it only to the turkey?), two dressings – one traditional with sage, onions, and celery, the other I don’t know – Rozanne is making it and she hasn’t made up her mind yet. She is also making the cranberry sauce, the recipe for which is in the last item posted in this diary.) I am making the wonderful Romanesco cauliflower (the chartreuse cauliflower). I bought it at the Greenmarket, and it’s probably the last time it will be available this season. I am keeping the cauliflower simple – just dressing it with butter-fried breadcrumbs, like my grandmother used to. And I am making peas because we have a couple of feasters who have to have their peas.

For dessert, my niece is making a pumpkin pie; my friend John East is making a chocolate cake from his family in Missouri; his wife, Robin, is doing I don’t know what, and I am making coconut custards – like the pie, but without the crust. Milt’s sister, Carol, is bringing good chocolates.

We won’t go hungry.